ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between crisis and intensified movement in literary depictions of Zimbabwean urbanities by focussing on three novels which convey a dystopian image of Zimbabwean city life in the first decade of the 21st century: Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), and Shimmer Chinodya’s Chairman of Fools (2005). The analyses of these three texts draw attention to numerous aspects which prove of importance to literary depictions of rural-urban mobility in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe as well as transnational mobility, and transcontinental movement. Of major importance is the co-existence of standstill and mobility. Restlessness and fluidity are central in each portrayal of urbanity, but the desired elsewhere is rarely reached. Of particular interest are also the ways in which intra-urban mobility is not only depicted as physical movement across geographical space but also as a practice which structures and makes the city. As the analyses show, this encompasses continuous acts of physical movement across the city, the ways in which characters employ movement as a form of resistance against structures of exclusion, and the function of mobility as a means of survival in a city in crisis.
